AWS post-mortem
 

Long story short, don't use AWS for anything ever. If you think you might want to, refer to this thread: You don't want to use them. Ever.

I started in adult in 2015 with AWS not knowing anything about the adult industry or being a webmaster or how to make a good stable website and definitely not anything about hosting options...the tech companies I had worked for previous to getting into adult (I'm talking about big companies literally all of you have used) used AWS and I had used their services for years as a programmer at all of these companies.

So of course AWS was the obvious choice for me. Familiar. Everyone uses it. Why shouldn't I.

But the costs...they just snowballed. For years, it just got worse and worse. At first it was a "woah" and eventually it was absurd. The servers are "only" 2x-3x what you'd pay with another company (assuming you buy a 3 year contract, otherwise they're 5x-10x) but the bandwidth...15x. 20x. 30x. It is absurd.

I stubbornly refused to switch hosting for years because I was still making a great profit...if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My system was complicated. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

But I finally decided to fix it. My costs were cut by 95% or more--mostly because bandwidth, but servers too.

Someone in a few years is gonna wonder where to host their adult site and find this thread...don't pick AWS, bud. I'm gonna recommend advancedhosting or ovh...and there's no affiliate links here and I def do not work for either of these companies. But you do you.

I hope this is helpful to other webmasters in the future.

I never considered AWS as an option, plus it seems it's quite complicated.

Most adult webmasters will be happy with Vacares, Mojohost or M3Server. Advancedhosting and OVH should be good too if you can manage your server.

That is a huge cut in savings, good decision making!

Thanks for the info!

I imagined that AWS would be more expensive than others, but those multipliers are shocking.

Congrats on the move :)

i like poo... :2 cents:

AWS is good for scalability and development projects where you don't know what resources you need.

When you know what resources you need, the costs are absurd and you are better off going with a fixed solution where you can control the costs.

Every single customer that we've brought over from AWS, we sliced their expenses by at least 50% (usually close to 70%) AND added fully managed support.